Sneak Peek into a few Gems of Citrix Lifecycle Management

Do you remember those days when IT administrators had to deploy enterprise applications and had to continuously monitor the health of the workloads to ensure they are running at optimal performance and had to manually scale to meet changing demands? Indeed, they must have been be really tough days!

But here comes Citrix Lifecycle Management (CLM), which is going to alleviate all of your pains.

Trust me, I said “all” of your pains, and that’s just what we mean. CLM automates the delivery of application workloads through out-of-the-box Citrix verified Blueprints, and monitors the health, performance and availability of application workloads in real-time.

Today I am going to show you briefly how to gain advantage from CLM through operations, monitored metrics, and alerts for these metrics. This blog is just a cursory overview to demonstrate the immense value which CLM offers.

Assume that you are an IT admin. Your normal work day has just started and you were happily troubleshooting a recent network issue which came up the night before, but suddenly a critical issue comes up that needs to be solved immediately. Of course, you want to get it done quickly because it’s impacting the business. You hastily analyze the problem and are able to find out the root cause. Kudos! But now you are figuring out how to get your solution implemented.

You know, somewhere in your mind, that you might need to launch a server (or a few) on a public or private cloud, and that you might need to run some scripts on that server periodically. Once the script executions are done, you think you might need to monitor the CPU utilization, disk usage, memory consumption and other metrics. Something related to automatic failover and failback is also running in the back of your head.

Aah! You start scratching off your head, searching the Internet wishing if there was an automatic tool which just asked you to perform some clicks and choose some configurations, and get your entire task done!

Then, it happens.

Because you used the right keywords, you find CLM! And after reading about what it does, you instantly know CLM is your savior! You quickly register and in a few moments, you are logged in, only to undergo the best user experience in your life.

You get your script ready, and create a new Blueprint. Your Blueprint contains a “Server” step, which you just dragged from the several options available. Your Blueprint looks like:

After that, you go ahead and access the “Manage” section in your Blueprint and add some operational tasks. You essentially set up a custom schedule let’s assume which repeats every 5 minutes and ends after 3 occurrences. You want to run your script on the server according to the custom schedule.

So you drag your script and put it up in the Steps section. The operations section of your Blueprint looks like:

Now that your Blueprint is all ready, you launch your Blueprint on an already set up Resource Location (just an environment on-premise or in cloud). Once the Blueprint is launched, you eagerly wait for the Blueprint to get completed successfully. After some time, it completes and you open up the deployment report.

You see the following message “agent registration successful” and know that the CLM agent is successfully installed on the server. With much anticipation you access the “Operations” section to see whether the magic happened? And you are amazed to see the below. Bingo! It just worked as the way you expected it to.

You take a sigh! And access the “Monitoring” section of your deployment, only to see nice visual graphs for standard data like CPU load, Disk Usage etc like below:

After getting to know that CLM also offers performance monitoring, your happiness has no bounds and you are brewing with ecstasy … But as we all know happiness is ephemeral.

Suddenly a new requirement comes in, and you are required to monitor a specific port. Assume that your server runs jetty and you are required to monitor whether jetty port is open and available at all times? And just in case if that is not the case even for a small duration, you are required to trigger an alert and raise emails. Man, it sounds critical.

Yes, indeed it is!

By now you are desperately wishing that you do not have to write long scripts or set up some external tools for creating custom monitors. And wondering whether CLM can do it for you?

After reading the product documentation, you realize that “YES,” CLM allows you to create and monitor custom metrics apart from the out-of-the-box ones. You feel like jumping out of your seat and taking a bow to thank the CLM creators. In almost no time you are able to add a new monitoring item like below:

You are smart and quickly set up an alert which will be triggered and will send emails to anyone and everyone whom you choose if the threshold is not met. Assuming you want to trigger the alert if the average value of the port is equal to 0 for 2 minutes, it would look like below:

Roger that!

You can now sit back and relax and CLM will take care of everything. In a matter of few minutes, you have launched a linux server on Ec2, set up a script to periodically run on that server, configured custom monitoring for new metrics and set up your alert notification system so that you and your team members are notified just in case the server goes down in the middle of the night!

That’s not the stopping point. It is just the beginning. You can also set up failover and failback rules for disaster recovery, and configure manual and auto scaling for efficiency and variation in demands. Isn’t it cool? Definitely!

In this blog, I have given just a taste of what CLM can do for you. Needless to say, CLM automates the entire lifecycle of Citrix applications through out-of-the-box Citrix verified blueprints for XenDesktop, XenApp, XenMobile, NetScaler and Workspace Suite, and other enterprise applications. I am sure you would have realized it by now, that how is CLM going to change and ROCK YOUR WORLD!

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